Hard Fork's 100 Most Iconic Technologies

“I just love imagining all of the angry emails we're going to get from people who are like, ‘Why did you put the fulcrum on this list?’”

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:35Casey Newton?

  I love Thanksgiving. I love the chance to actually, you know, prepare things a couple of days in advance. You know, it's very exciting. I don't know if you've ever, you know, brined a turkey over like one or two days. That's like, to me, that's thrilling.

• 0:46Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 0:47Casey Newton?

  Putting that much effort into dinner.

• 0:48Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Have you ever done the like, deep fried turkey?

• 0:51Casey Newton?

  I never have, and for this reason, I'm confident that's how I would die.

• 0:54Kevin Roose?

  It's true. You can find all kinds of videos online of people like almost burning down their houses because of their attempts to deep fry turkeys.

• 1:01Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:02Kevin Roose?

  But don't you kind of feel like that'd be a little fun? Like a little

• 1:04Casey Newton?

  Of course.

• 1:04Kevin Roose?

  A little extreme?

• 1:06Casey Newton?

  Of course.

• 1:06Kevin Roose?

  A little free song of danger?

• 1:07Casey Newton?

  Well, it's like, it's like, you know, on 4th of July, when people carry their fireworks out into the street and they have the sparklers and everything, it looks very cool. I will not touch them because all I can think about is the emergency room statistics that I read on July 5th every year. But I'm happy to watch it. And that's how I feel about somebody frying a turkey.

• 1:23Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:24Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:24Kevin Roose?

  Well, I'm going to fry a turkey this year.

• 1:26Casey Newton?

  All right. Well, let's know how it goes. And if you need emergency medical attention.

• 1:35Casey Newton?

  I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Newt from Platformer.

• 1:38Kevin Roose?

  And this is Hard Fork.

• 1:39Casey Newton?

  This week, it's a Thanksgiving special. We're counting down the 100 most iconic technologies of all time. There's lots to be grateful for. What will be number one?

• 1:49Kevin Roose?

  Got to be the scrub daddy.

• 1:50Casey Newton?

  Ooh. We'll find out.

• 2:10Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, we have something a little different today.

• 2:13Casey Newton?

  We do, Kevin. We have a celebration.

• 2:14Kevin Roose?

  A celebration of technology.

• 2:16Casey Newton?

  Yes. You know, so often on this show, we come to you week after week and we tell you about the challenges that technology is creating, the things that we're worried about. But when it came time for our Thanksgiving episode, Kevin, you and I said to each other, maybe we could just celebrate today.

• 2:31Kevin Roose?

  Yes. So we are going to do something today that we've never done before. We are going to do a list of the 100 most iconic technologies.

• 2:41Casey Newton?

  We are. And if I could say a word about how this came about, the other day I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Los Culturistas, and they counted down the 400 most iconic people in pop culture. And it was so much fun. And I laughed and I smiled and I learned so many facts. And I thought, I am going to rip this off for Hard Fork. It was such a good idea and it was so fun. And I thought, there's been so much incredible technology, you know, since the dawn of mankind. And frankly, Kevin, we've talked about very little of it on our show.

• 3:14Kevin Roose?

  It's true. It's true. Very few episodes devoted to things like the fulcrum. But today, the fulcrum gets its due.

• 3:21Casey Newton?

  It gets its due.

• 3:22Kevin Roose?

  And 99 other iconic technologies. So Casey, what do we mean when we say iconic technology?

• 3:27Casey Newton?

  That is a great question, you know, because just because something is on this list doesn't mean that it is 100% good. It doesn't mean that no bad things have ever happened as a result of this technology. But it means that it has earned a place in the landscape as something where if you were putting together a list, as we did, of the technologies that really sum up the past few thousand years on Earth, this belongs on that list.

• 3:51Kevin Roose?

  Yes. I would say it is technologies that changed the world, our lives, or both.

• 3:56Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And we have a few facts that we can share with you about these technologies. So maybe you can learn a little something. And we also imagine that you're probably going to disagree with us on some of these, Kevin.

• 4:06Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. And when that happens, just know that you are wrong.

• 4:10Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 4:10Kevin Roose?

  Because this is the authoritative list.

• 4:12Casey Newton?

  Now, Kevin, tell our listeners about the authoritative process that we went through to accurately rank all 100 technologies on this list.

• 4:20Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, we consulted a panel of dozens of experts, historians, engineers, CEOs, government officials. We commissioned a survey and we sent it to hundreds of thousands of people. No, we made a Google Doc and we just started putting things in it. And that's how we got the Hard Fork 100.

• 4:40Casey Newton?

  And it raises the question, is Google Docs on the iconic 100? And well, you're just gonna have to listen to find out.

• 4:45Kevin Roose?

  All right, so we're gonna count down from 100 to 1. We're gonna try to do all of these entries in 30 seconds or less.

• 4:53Casey Newton?

  That's right. We are gonna try to get through these quickly. You know, we know you have places to be on Thanksgiving weekend. So we're gonna do this very judiciously and expeditiously. All of a sudden, I sound like Don King.

• 5:07Kevin Roose?

  I'm gonna say we're gonna try to do it deliciously.

• 5:09Casey Newton?

  Oh, perfect. Even better. Even better.

• 5:11Kevin Roose?

  All right, let's go. 100 iconic technologies.

• 5:15Casey Newton?

  And it's time to start the countdown and we will begin with number 100.

• 5:20Kevin Roose?

  Boats.

• 5:21Casey Newton?

  Boats are an incredible way to get across the water. Before the advent of boats, if you came to a wide river and you needed to get across, you were out of luck.

• 5:30Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and, you know, many people died trying to swim across large bodies of water. And then they figured out, wait a minute, we could make a craft to carry us across the water. And Casey, do you know what the oldest boat in the world is?

• 5:41Casey Newton?

  What's the oldest boat?

• 5:42Kevin Roose?

  Well, it's believed to be called the Pesh Canoe. And it was discovered in 1955 in the Netherlands. It's believed to be about 10,000 years old.

• 5:50Casey Newton?

  Amazing, amazing. Well, that brings us to number 99.

• 5:54Kevin Roose?

  Calculators.

• 5:56Casey Newton?

  Oh, boy, I would not have made it out of math class without one of these, Kevin.

• 6:00Kevin Roose?

  Yes. So electronic calculators have been around since the early 1960s. Texas Instruments made the first ever handheld calculator in 1967. And Casey, what would you say the best thing you've ever done on a calculator is?

• 6:12Casey Newton?

  The best thing I've ever done on a calculator is play the game Snake on my TI-83 in trigonometry.

• 6:19Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, well, I use it to factor some quadratic equations. So that's the on-label use.

• 6:24Casey Newton?

  Very good.

• 6:24Kevin Roose?

  Okay, number 98.

• 6:26Casey Newton?

  NFTs.

• 6:28Kevin Roose?

  Casey, why did NFTs make the list?

• 6:29Casey Newton?

  Non-fungible tokens. Look, they're incredibly controversial. Many people hate them, and yet they did open up a new way of seeing the internet, of creating scarcity on the internet where none existed before. And some people think that they might be primed for a comeback in the coming years.

• 6:45Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I actually sold it in a few. You remember that?

• 6:47Casey Newton?

  I do. You made a lot of money for this company.

• 6:48Kevin Roose?

  Well, I made a lot of money for the charity of the New York Times, which I gave the money to. It sold for something like $560,000. That's 350 ETH back when I did this as a stunt. I looked that up yesterday, and it turns out that would be more than $1 million today.

• 7:03Casey Newton?

  That's great. You told me you would never donate to charity. I can't believe you actually went through with that.

• 7:07Kevin Roose?

  Okay, number 97. Oregon Trail.

• 7:11Casey Newton?

  Wow, was this a video game?

• 7:12Kevin Roose?

  Classic video game.

• 7:14Casey Newton?

  When there were hardly any video games, somehow they brought a video game into school, and it taught us all what dysentery was.

• 7:20Kevin Roose?

  It's true. My favorite fun fact about Oregon Trail, it was created by three student teachers in Minnesota who are trying to spice up a history class.

• 7:28Casey Newton?

  Oh, my gosh. Well, and they're all icons, every single one. I mean, you want to talk about making history come alive using the power of technology? No one ever did it better than Oregon Trail.

• 7:35Kevin Roose?

  It's true. I loved Oregon Trail as a game. I mostly loved the part where you could shoot the buffalo.

• 7:40Casey Newton?

  Number 96. The Spinning Jenny.

• 7:43Kevin Roose?

  Casey, what is the Spinning Jenny?

• 7:44Casey Newton?

  I honestly have no idea. You're gonna have to tell me.

• 7:47Kevin Roose?

  Okay, well, I'm glad you asked. The Spinning Jenny was one of the first pieces of equipment that is credited with sparking the Industrial Revolution. It allowed people to spin and weave textiles much, much faster. And it may have also contributed to the American Revolutionary War, because the Spinning Jenny caused the price of British cloth to fall, which flooded the US market with cheap imports and made American merchants very mad.

• 8:08Casey Newton?

  You have my head spinning. I'm a spinning. Casey. Number 95, radio. Oh my gosh, imagine your morning commute in the 1990s and early 2000s without the radio, Kevin.

• 8:17Kevin Roose?

  You just have to talk to the other person in your stagecoach.

• 8:19Casey Newton?

  You'd have to yell at people in the stagecoach over. Radio, I mean, it was one of the first major shifts in the media, right? Because before then, everything was written down. All of a sudden with radio, you could broadcast, you could broadcast music, you could broadcast talk radio, you could spread vicious lies. It's amazing. Number 94, Vine. Wow, six-second looping clips that set the stage for the short-form video era that we still live into this very day, Kevin.

• 8:47Kevin Roose?

  I miss Vine so much.

• 8:48Casey Newton?

  Oh, I mean, think about all of the iconic Vine quotes that are just probably in your head right now. For me, it's back at it again at the Krispy Kreme. What about you?

• 8:57Kevin Roose?

  I love the one with the rubber ducks. You know which one I'm talking about?

• 9:00Casey Newton?

  Yes, that all make the noise.

• 9:02Kevin Roose?

  Yes, so go look up Rubber Duck Vine if you have not seen that. The first Vine ever shared was on January 23rd, 2013, when Dick Costolo, then the CEO of Twitter, tweeted a six-second video of someone preparing steak tartare at Le Zal, a French restaurant in New York City.

• 9:20Casey Newton?

  Number 93, the KitchenAid Stand Mixer.

• 9:23Kevin Roose?

  Casey, you put this one on the list. Why?

• 9:24Casey Newton?

  Well, here's why, Kevin, because this thing has me rolling in dough and not the money kind. It's the kind that I'm using to bake cookies, cakes, pies. And let me tell you something, if you're a single person and you're 20, there's a chance that you're thinking, I have to wait until I get married to get a KitchenAid Stand Mixer. And when I was much younger and in this world, I'll never forget, a friend said to me, you know what, Casey, you can just go buy a KitchenAid Stand Mixer today. And I went and I did it. And Kevin, I would say that, you know, during the pandemic, when I was baking chocolate chip cookies every week, that thing, I was using that as often as I was using my laptop. That's good technology.

• 9:55Kevin Roose?

  And one fun fact about the KitchenAid Stand Mixer is that the now iconic design was created in the 1930s by Egmont Arons, a former editor who also designed the ice cube dispenser.

• 10:06Casey Newton?

  Oh, no wonder I love him so much. Number 92, barcodes. Oh boy, have you been to a restaurant lately? Maybe you've seen, no, that way, that's a QR code.

• 10:15Kevin Roose?

  But barcodes were the precursor to the QR code. And they made checkout and inventory much, much faster. You had to, previously, you had to write down every, everything had to have a number associated with it. But barcodes were this invention that allowed for much faster processing of goods at stores. The first item scanned with a universal product code barcode was a pack of Wrigley's juicy fruit chewing gum on June 26, 1974, at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio. Thank you, barcodes.

• 10:41Casey Newton?

  Number 91, drones. Wow, this is a way you can, you could take a little object and it can fly around and Kevin, it can take pictures. And with some of the more advanced ones, they can actually even kill a person.

• 10:52Kevin Roose?

  Yes, we included this on the list because I'm pretty sure that drones are what's gonna end our lives.

• 10:56Casey Newton?

  Yes, but in the meantime, I would still say they have mostly positive applications. And when I watch TV, I'm constantly seeing very cool shots by drones. And I have friends who have drones and take them out and, you know, they'll record themselves, you know, skiing down the side of a mountain.

• 11:10Kevin Roose?

  Wow, amazing.

• 11:11Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Number 90, the Nintendo DS.

• 11:14Kevin Roose?

  Casey, why'd you put this on?

• 11:15Casey Newton?

  Look, there are so many amazing game consoles and I kind of wanted to put all of them on this list. But when I thought about what is a console that really took the world for it? It was the Nintendo DS. It was sort of the evolution of the Game Boy. This was one of the first major mass market handheld consoles. And if you talk to any sort of millennial, they will tell you that some of the happiest memories of their lives are playing Pokemon on their Nintendo DS.

• 11:41Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Casey Newton?

  And that's an iconic technology to me. Number 89, Zoom. Wow, imagine the pandemic without Zoom, you can't.

• 11:49Kevin Roose?

  It's true. There were other web video conferencing pieces of software, but they were all terrible.

• 11:54Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 11:54Kevin Roose?

  And Zoom came along and really changed the game. And do you know what the original name of Zoom was?

• 11:59Casey Newton?

  What was it?

• 11:59Kevin Roose?

  SasBee.

• 12:00Casey Newton?

  SasBee? Okay, why is that so much better than Zoom? Catch me on SasBee. Damn, now I wanna say that. But seriously though, Zoom was a social lifeline for me for about two years. And while I never want to use it ever again, I do respect the time I spent with it in 2020 and 2021.

• 12:20Casey Newton?

  Number 88, the sundial. Oh my gosh, Kevin, believe it or not, there was a time before watches. There was a time before clocks. And you know what we had? Sundials.

• 12:29Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, do you like ever think about who the first person ever was who was like, you know what would be interesting and good? A way to tell what time it was.

• 12:36Casey Newton?

  I mean, imagine being the first person to have that idea and just be like, wait a minute, we could just put a stick in the ground.

• 12:42Kevin Roose?

  Was that the first sundial, a stick in the ground? No, that would be the sun stick in the ground. It was a dial that let you know what time it was. That's why it's called a sundial.

• 12:50Casey Newton?

  Number 87. The Haber-Bosch process. Oh, go off, King.

• 12:54Kevin Roose?

  I love this one. So, did you know that fertilizer is one of the most important things in the world? Because it allows for mass agriculture.

• 13:02Casey Newton?

  Absolutely.

• 13:03Kevin Roose?

  And before humans learned to synthesize ammonia using the Haber-Bosch process, nitrogen was a major constraint on the proliferation of life on this planet. You need fertilizer to grow crops, to make fertilizer, you need ammonia. The Haber-Bosch process was an invention that allowed us to mass produce fertilizer. And a 2008 study estimated that without the Haber-Bosch process, about half the world's population wouldn't have enough food. The mass production of fertilizer has also been linked to serious environmental damage and runoffs from fertilizer are one of the leading things damaging the earth. So, in conclusion, the Haber-Bosch process, it's a land of contrasts.

• 13:38Casey Newton?

  Number 86. Linux, open source software is a huge, you know, before Linux really entered its heyday, so much software, it just, it came in a box. It was packaged. You were paying a hundred bucks for it and this created a lot of problems. And then along came Linus Torvalds, Kevin, and he built this open source operating system and he actually gave it away for free.

• 13:58Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Casey Newton?

  And this enabled so much innovation that we continue to see people build on to this very day.

• 14:03Kevin Roose?

  Everything runs on Linux. It also powers Androids, so billions of devices that way. And the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world all run on Linux.

• 14:12Casey Newton?

  Number 85. Podcasts. Put it this way, if it were for podcasts, you'd have to be talking to your family right now.

• 14:20Kevin Roose?

  Yes, this may have been a little selfish to include this on the list, but I do think they're an important technology. And do you know that Ben Hammersley, the journalist who is credited with coining the term podcasting, also suggested two other names for this emerging form of audio broadcasting?

• 14:32Casey Newton?

  Let me guess, number one, SASBEAT?

• 14:35Kevin Roose?

  No, the two other names he suggested were audioblogging and guerrilla media. So if those had taken off, you could be guerrilling this podcast right now.

• 14:43Casey Newton?

  I think we found our way to the right one. Number 84, fracking. RuPaul's favorite technology, I'll say that.

• 14:50Kevin Roose?

  It's so important.

• 14:51Casey Newton?

  Tell us about fracking.

• 14:52Kevin Roose?

  Well, fracking is a method of extracting natural gas from shale deposits found deep underground. And while it does have many environmental side effects and is rightly controversial, it has also allowed the US to become a net energy exporter and has totally changed global politics. We used to fight wars over oil, Casey, but we don't fight as many of them because we now have this plentiful deposit of natural gas.

• 15:14Casey Newton?

  Why does it sound like this item was placed by the National Fracking Council? Number 83, fonts. Oh, my gosh, can you imagine? There was a time when you would be just typing on your typewriter and all the letters just looked one way.

• 15:26Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 15:27Casey Newton?

  Along came fonts, Kevin.

• 15:28Kevin Roose?

  That's true.

• 15:29Casey Newton?

  And with the rise of desktop publishing, all of a sudden, kids like me could design our own newsletters, our own zines, our own websites, and use different fonts to convey different aspects of our personality.

• 15:40Kevin Roose?

  It's so important.

• 15:41Casey Newton?

  It's like a little bit of art. And in fact, Wingdings, which was one of those early 90s popular fonts, was one of the first ways that we were able to bring art into publishing.

• 15:50Kevin Roose?

  What's the best font?

• 15:51Casey Newton?

  The best font is, to me, Futura. How about for you?

• 15:54Kevin Roose?

  I'm an Arial guy, but do you know what the most used font in the world is?

• 15:58Casey Newton?

  What's that?

• 15:58Kevin Roose?

  It's probably Roboto. You know what Roboto is?

• 16:01Casey Newton?

  Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.

• 16:02Kevin Roose?

  Default font on Android devices.

• 16:04Casey Newton?

  Number 82, Patreon. Patreon is so great because it's just an indictment of YouTube. Patreon is just a group of features that YouTube should have had but didn't. And one day, Jack Conte and his friends said, hey, what if you really liked a YouTuber and you could just pay them directly to make the thing that you want to see more of? And frankly, it kicked off the creator revolution in a big way.

• 16:25Kevin Roose?

  I agree with all of that. I have nothing to add.

• 16:27Casey Newton?

  Period. Number 81, concrete. Now, Kevin, give us some concrete examples.

• 16:33Kevin Roose?

  Well, concrete is a mixture of cement with aggregates like sand and gravel plus water. And did you know that it is the second most used substance in the world after water?

• 16:43Casey Newton?

  I would never have guessed that.

• 16:44Kevin Roose?

  Twice as much concrete is used in construction as all other building materials combined. Without concrete, no skyscrapers, no buildings, no cities, no life.

• 16:52Casey Newton?

  No icons.

• 16:53Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Casey Newton?

  Number 80, Juul, one of my favorite singers.

• 16:56Kevin Roose?

  No, no, we're talking about the vaping technology, not the singer Juul or the item, the gemstone Juul. But Juul was, it kicked off the e-cigarette vaping revolution, which has had many unintended consequences and has hooked an entire generation on nicotine, but has also probably saved some people from smoking tobacco and tobacco use has been falling. So I think we can say the legacy of Juul is mixed at best, but it is an important technology.

• 17:23Casey Newton?

  And it is an icon. Number 79, anesthesia. Oh, boy. I would not want to have major surgery without it.

• 17:29Kevin Roose?

  And yet, for thousands of years, people had surgery without anesthesia.

• 17:33Casey Newton?

  Can you imagine the screams that must have been coming out of the world when we didn't have anesthesia?

• 17:37Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, thank God for anesthesia. Do you know what the first local anesthetic was?

• 17:40Casey Newton?

  What was that?

• 17:40Kevin Roose?

  Cocaine.

• 17:41Casey Newton?

  Interesting.

• 17:41Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Casey Newton?

  You know, I went on a date with an anesthesiologist once.

• 17:44Kevin Roose?

  Really?

• 17:44Casey Newton?

  Put me to sleep.

• 17:47Casey Newton?

  Number 78, Netflix. Oh, my goodness. Remember before Netflix, you had to go to the video store. Often it was called Blockbuster and you'd have to bring back the cassette tape within five or seven days or they would fine you, Kevin.

• 17:58Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and you had to rewind it or you wouldn't be kind.

• 18:00Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and then Netflix came along and said, hey, keep the dang DVD for as long as you want and you can maybe invite a hookup over and have a little bit of what came to be known as a Netflix and chill.

• 18:10Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Thanks, Netflix.

• 18:12Casey Newton?

  Number 77, screws.

• 18:14Kevin Roose?

  Screws are so important, Casey. Do you know that?

• 18:16Casey Newton?

  You're telling me.

• 18:16Kevin Roose?

  But screws, seriously, are important because once they became standardized, all of a sudden you could have interchangeable parts.

• 18:22Casey Newton?

  Oh.

• 18:23Kevin Roose?

  And you never think about that, but it was so important that we landed on a standard screw where you could put one screw from one thing into another thing and that made a lot of stuff possible.

• 18:33Casey Newton?

  Beautiful. Number 76, seat belts. Oh, my gosh, you do not want to be in a car without a seatbelt. Imagine there's a crash, you could go flying out the window.

• 18:40Kevin Roose?

  Seat belts are probably the best thing that Ralph Nader ever did for this world.

• 18:44Casey Newton?

  Better even than running for president 11 times.

• 18:47Kevin Roose?

  Yes. Yes. His campaign to install seat belts in cars was a major part of why they installed them, and that has greatly reduced traffic deaths.

• 18:56Casey Newton?

  Number 75.

• 18:57Kevin Roose?

  Disposable diapers. Oh, Casey, as a parent whose child wears diapers, I cannot imagine the world before disposable diapers. And yet, for thousands of years, children were raised with cloth diapers or no diapers at all, or rubber pants.

• 19:13Casey Newton?

  And wasn't that better for the environment, Kevin?

• 19:15Kevin Roose?

  Well, it may have been better for the environment, but it was also much worse for babies. They would get skin rashes. The parents would also have to spend many hours a day cleaning their diapers. But in the 1940s, a woman named Mary Ann Donovan came up with the idea of a disposable diaper that would be better for babies and parents. And she made the first forerunner to the disposable diaper out of a shower curtain.

• 19:35Casey Newton?

  You know, I heard when she came up with this idea, she was so excited she pissed herself. Number 74.

• 19:41Kevin Roose?

  Amazon Prime.

• 19:43Casey Newton?

  Before Amazon Prime, you would often have to leave the house if you wanted goods to come into your home.

• 19:48Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and now not anymore.

• 19:50Casey Newton?

  Every day, package after package, I think for many of us, and did the pandemic illustrate this in a big way, Amazon Prime just makes life easier for people.

• 19:58Kevin Roose?

  It totally revolutionized the world of e-commerce. It created a flywheel of loyal customers for Amazon. And I think it helped turn Amazon into the world-striding behemoth that it is today.

• 20:09Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And then at some point, they decided, we're going to make a TV show called Fleabag. And nobody really quite understood how that fit into the delivery thing, but it was a very good show.

• 20:17Kevin Roose?

  Do you know what the original code name for Amazon Prime was?

• 20:19Casey Newton?

  Was it SASB?

• 20:20Kevin Roose?

  No. No, it was Futurama.

• 20:22Casey Newton?

  Hmm. 73.

• 20:24Kevin Roose?

  Microsoft Excel.

• 20:26Casey Newton?

  You know, some people are going to get mad at us for putting this low on the list because for some people, Microsoft Excel is their entire world. And I get that and I respect it.

• 20:33Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. When I used to cover Wall Street, I learned just how much of the world runs on Microsoft Excel. It is truly the most important technology in the world of work. And it was actually a huge part of what convinced people to buy the Apple II, which was one of the first popular personal computers. Steve Jobs has said that actually the key to the Apple II was that it had Visicalc, which was a spreadsheet program that was a precursor to Microsoft Excel.

• 20:57Casey Newton?

  When people say killer app, they're talking about Microsoft Excel. Number 72, roads. Oh my god, before roads, you would just sort of have to look for a wide spot in the jungle. Let's do this again. Roads are such an important way of getting from one place to another, Kevin.

• 21:14Kevin Roose?

  It's true. And Casey, do you know what the longest road in the world is?

• 21:17Casey Newton?

  What is it, Kevin?

• 21:17Kevin Roose?

  Well, it's the Pan American Highway, which covers nearly 19,000 miles from Alaska to Argentina.

• 21:23Casey Newton?

  God, that makes me want to go drive it with you right now.

• 21:25Kevin Roose?

  Let's do it.

• 21:26Casey Newton?

  Road trip?

• 21:26Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Casey Newton?

  There were no road trips without roads.

• 21:28Kevin Roose?

  That's true. That's true. And you wouldn't have had the iconic movie Road Trip that starred Tom Green.

• 21:34Casey Newton?

  Or Thelma and Louise, another road trip movie that didn't have road trip in the title.

• 21:38Kevin Roose?

  That's true.

• 21:38Casey Newton?

  Number 71, databases.

• 21:41Kevin Roose?

  I would put this in the category of Microsoft Excel of like extremely boring technology that is, without which the world would cease to function.

• 21:48Casey Newton?

  Yes, this is the underpinning of so much of modern life. Anytime you do anything, it's being stored in a database. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons, but it is making the world go round.

• 21:57Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and specifically, I would say relational databases, which were invented around 1970, are the key technology that basically the entire world is built on now. They are different from other databases, since you're asking, because they organize data into interconnected tables with defined relationships, using primary keys, foreign keys, and SQL to ensure data integrity.

• 22:16Casey Newton?

  I've been wondering about that. Number 70, insulin. If you have diabetes, the invention of insulin changed your life and may have saved your life.

• 22:23Kevin Roose?

  No, it definitely saved your life. Yeah, diabetes, type 1 diabetes, used to be basically a death sentence. If you got it, you would probably die.

• 22:29Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 22:30Kevin Roose?

  And there was not much you could do about it, but in 1889, two German researchers made a discovery because they found out that when you removed the pancreas gland from dogs, the dogs got diabetes and died. And later, in 1921, a young surgeon named Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best, figured out how to remove insulin from a dog's pancreas. The first human was injected with insulin in 1922. It was a 13-year-old boy, and it saved his life.

• 22:55Casey Newton?

  Just goes to show you, never be afraid to remove a dog's gland. You never know what you'll invent. Number 69, OnlyFans. So OnlyFans was invented in 2016, and I think it came out of the movement that Patreon started. But OnlyFans is really, I think, the most successful company in the entire creator economy. It is obviously a lot of not safer work and adult content, but guess what? Adults deserve to have an internet too. And I think OnlyFans has been a huge positive, not just for the creators there, who are, many of whom are making tons of money, but also just for the internet at large, to have a place for adults on the internet to like, explore their interests.

• 23:32Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and if listeners would like to find your OnlyFans page, where can they go?

• 23:35Casey Newton?

  It's at platformer.news. Number 68, Dolby Surround Sound.

• 23:40Kevin Roose?

  Why'd you put this on the list?

• 23:41Casey Newton?

  Here's why, because before Dolby Surround Sound, movies didn't sound as cool. You know, like the whole experience of going to a movie is you sit in the seat and then you see the big Dolby thing and they play like the really loud noise and it sounds cool. And like you know that Star Wars is gonna sound much better here than it's gonna sound, you know, at your house.

• 23:59Kevin Roose?

  Okay, well, uh, I don't really use Dolby Surround Sound much.

• 24:03Casey Newton?

  No? What do you, you just want the, you just want the straight stereo, left, right channels?

• 24:07Kevin Roose?

  I, I mean, I guess I'm not an audiophile like you are.

• 24:09Casey Newton?

  No, you wanna have the subwoofer, you wanna have those rear speakers, and when it all comes together, I'm telling you, that is the best way to watch anything.

• 24:16Kevin Roose?

  Will you come to my house and install a Dolby Surround Sound system?

• 24:18Casey Newton?

  Absolutely not. Number 67, Doom.

• 24:21Kevin Roose?

  We're not talking about the concept of Doom, this is the video game Doom, which I would argue changed the course of modern computing. Why is that? Because Doom was one of the first first-person shooter games. It was also one of the first multiplayer internet games, and it had this thing called texture mapping, which basically started an arms race among the people who built video games, trying to make more and more realistic environments in those video games, which led to the creation of something called the GPU, which was a special processor that we now know was the key to unlocking everything that we now see in AI today, as well as things like cryptocurrency mining.

• 25:01Casey Newton?

  There is no AI without Doom. Number 66, Ibuprofen. This really is the main technology that we have to deal with headaches.

• 25:10Kevin Roose?

  It's true. Do you take a lot of Ibuprofen?

• 25:13Casey Newton?

  I actually prefer Naproxen, it works a little bit better for me, but guess what, Kevin, if there's no Naproxen around, I'm going straight to Ibuprofen.

• 25:19Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, Ibuprofen really, really does a lot for you.

• 25:22Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 25:23Kevin Roose?

  In the pain department.

• 25:25Casey Newton?

  And speaking of pain, we have 65 more of these.

• 25:30Casey Newton?

  Number 65, the compass.

• 25:33Kevin Roose?

  Well, compasses are a great way of figuring out where you're going, which I would say is an important technology if you are lost.

• 25:38Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 25:39Kevin Roose?

  Or if you're trying to navigate over land or sea.

• 25:41Casey Newton?

  I've never had a sense of direction, but you know what? I have had at various points in my life, Kevin, a compass. And from time to time, it has gotten me where I was trying to go.

• 25:48Kevin Roose?

  When was the last time you used a compass?

• 25:49Casey Newton?

  I would say when I was trying to get out of the New York City subway and I like had Google Maps open on my phone. And I'm like sort of spinning around in a circle. That's the last time I used a compass.

• 25:58Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, well, compasses, the person who made that really snapped off because, you know, without it, we'd all be lost.

• 26:04Casey Newton?

  And I believe it was the Han Dynasty, was it not?

• 26:06Kevin Roose?

  No, I think it was Mr. Compass.

• 26:07Casey Newton?

  Oh, okay. Number 64, AOL Instant Messenger.

• 26:11Kevin Roose?

  I would say that few technologies have changed my life more than AOL Instant Messenger, which came on the scene when I was a child and quickly took over my social life. It was the main way that my friends and I communicated. And it really introduced this concept of instant messaging, which we now see everywhere.

• 26:25Casey Newton?

  It's ubiquitous. And I would also argue it was essentially the proto-social network, right? Like, when I was in college, you would set up your little away message. People would be able to check in on you, see what you were up to.

• 26:36Kevin Roose?

  The key was to put like coded messages to your crush in your away message.

• 26:39Casey Newton?

  Using song lyrics.

• 26:40Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 26:41Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 26:41Kevin Roose?

  Exactly. The first AOL Instant Message was sent by Ted Leonsis, the AOL executive, to his wife in 1993. And it read, "Don't be scared. It is me. Love you and miss you."

• 26:52Casey Newton?

  Oh, that's beautiful.

• 26:53Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 26:53Casey Newton?

  Number 63, GPS. The Global Positioning System. This is how your phone and your car know where you are in the world.

• 27:00Kevin Roose?

  Yes, I would put this in the same category as the compass, but it was sort of like the, the next big thing in navigation after the compass. And it's part of the modern world. No one would have any idea where they were if it weren't for GPS.

• 27:12Casey Newton?

  We would all be lost simultaneously if it weren't for GPS.

• 27:15Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and we would have missed out on a great episode of The Office, which is where Michael and Dwight are driving in a car with GPS. And they follow the GPS and end up driving into a lake.

• 27:24Casey Newton?

  Number 62, compound interest.

• 27:26Kevin Roose?

  It's maybe apocryphal, but Albert Einstein is often credited with saying the compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. And that's because it is the force that means that when you loan somebody something, they can pay it back with interest. And that interest can comp-

• 27:39Casey Newton?

  Over time, compound interest, I would argue, made things like agriculture and banking possible. It made the concept of governments issuing currency and lending out money through bonds possible. Compound interest drives the world today, and without it, we would be a much different society. And it's also very controversial over time.

• 27:58Kevin Roose?

  Because usury, or the practice of charging excessive interest on loans, has been outlawed by a bunch of major religions and societies over time, and just generally been a pretty bad thing in the world.

• 28:08Casey Newton?

  For more on that, you can read the Bible. Number 61, Facebook News Feed. So, look, before the Facebook News Feed, there was no way of sort of having an ambient sense of which ones of your friends were getting in and out of relationships and why.

• 28:21Kevin Roose?

  It's true. The Facebook News Feed, I would argue, was one of the most important innovations in early social networking. It changed Facebook from a place where you would have to go to someone's profile to see what was up with them, to a place where you could have a personalized, algorithmically ranked feed of everything happening on the network, which, depending on who you asked, was either a major step forward in making social media feel more personalized and engaging, or it created surveillance capitalism.

• 28:46Casey Newton?

  Yeah, we live in the world that the News Feed created. Number 60, Dolly the Sheep. Dolly, of course, was the first mammal ever to be cloned from an adult cell. This happened in 1996. It absolutely captured the public's imagination. It led to a lot of dystopian sci-fi. You know, Kevin, Dolly herself only lived six years, but I'm told that after she died, she really did turn out to be delicious.

• 29:07Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, she died in 2003, but four clones made using the same genetic material were created in 2007, nicknamed the Nottingham Dollys, and they lived healthy lives into old age.

• 29:19Casey Newton?

  And if I ever met their creator, I'd say, thanks for mutton.

• 29:22Kevin Roose?

  I'd say hello, Dolly.

• 29:23Casey Newton?

  Number 59, Tesla. You want to take this one?

• 29:26Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, as the world's biggest Elon Musk fan, I think you should make the case that Tesla is an iconic technology.

• 29:32Casey Newton?

  I mean, a lot of our listeners are probably driving around in Teslas right now. Teslas are very cool cars, and they do deserve credit for kind of catalyzing the electric car revolution in this country.

• 29:41Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think before Teslas, there were electric cars, but they were sort of coded as like, things for crunchy hippies to drive around the streets. of Berkeley, California. But I think Tesla really brought them to the mass market. And whatever you think of Elon Musk, I think it's a pretty important thing that he did with Tesla.

• 29:57Casey Newton?

  Number 58, Tumblr. Tumblr really, I think, was the first successful microblog. There was, of course, Twitter, but Twitter was all text based. But Tumblr sort of took this basic idea of blogging and said, what if you made it much shorter? What if you made it more mixed media? And to this day, Tumblr remains a favorite social network for millions of people because it is just weirder, funkier, funnier than almost anything else. So I truly believe that Tumblr is an icon of technology.

• 30:25Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I never use Tumblr. That's a fun fact about me, but I trust you on this one.

• 30:30Casey Newton?

  It's very good. You should check it out. Number 57, the lever.

• 30:34Kevin Roose?

  Casey, the lever is so important. Do you say lever or lever?

• 30:37Casey Newton?

  I say both, and I don't explain why.

• 30:39Kevin Roose?

  It's interesting, though, that it's leverage, but people say lever. It should be leverage.

• 30:44Casey Newton?

  That's another mystery of language, language, of course, being one of the other iconic inventions. But right now, let's focus on the lever or the lever. It's your call, Kevin.

• 30:51Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so however you choose to pronounce it, it is obviously an iconic technology. Archimedes was often credited with saying, give me a place to stand and with a lever, I will move the whole world.

• 31:02Casey Newton?

  And then he did. And you know, if anybody ever tried to get rid of it, Kevin, I'd say, leave her alone. Number 56, Bitcoin.

• 31:10Kevin Roose?

  Bitcoin, whatever you think of it, whether it's a speculative bubble or an enduring piece of technology, it did change the way that people thought about money on the internet. And it was created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor. And it gave rise to basically the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem, which is currently valued at something like $3 trillion.

• 31:31Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and it's about to take over the entire United States government. So if you're not familiar with Bitcoin, great time to read up on it. Number 55, Motorola Razr. So before the iPhone, we were really struggling for cool phones, Kevin, right? A lot of them had this so-called candy bar shape. They were very ugly. They were very industrial. They looked like, you know, something that you would see like somebody working at a used car dealership. I don't know why I'm criticizing people who work at used car dealerships. The Motorola Razor was beautiful, sleek lines, very satisfying snap when it closed. And it became one of the first icons in mobile phone technology. Everyone wanted one of these things.

• 32:10Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it was a real status gadget when that category was sort of new.

• 32:14Casey Newton?

  Number 54, gunpowder. Kevin, tell us about gunpowder.

• 32:18Kevin Roose?

  Well, I would put gunpowder into the category of iconic, but pretty harmful. It was invented in 9th century China and it's led to a lot of warfare.

• 32:26Casey Newton?

  It has, and I'll say it, it's led to too much warfare. And if we could go back in time and get rid of the gunpowder and transition to a more swords-based combat universe, I'd be in favor of it.

• 32:35Kevin Roose?

  Me too.

• 32:35Casey Newton?

  Number 53, Snapchat. Snapchat invented so much of the web that we use today. Of course, disappearing messages, that was huge. Also, stories, the idea of an ephemeral post on a social network, something that could only be viewed for 24 hours. They also were the first major tech company to release kind of fun little augmented reality glasses. So, very few companies have had as many good ideas as Snapchat. And so it is surprising that this company remains as unprofitable as it is.

• 33:03Kevin Roose?

  Well, very few companies have had as many good ideas that were immediately stolen by Mark Zuckerberg and Meta as Snapchat.

• 33:11Casey Newton?

  That's good. Number 52, condoms. You know, Austin Powers once said that condoms are only for sailors, but I think other people should wear them as well.

• 33:18Kevin Roose?

  Yes, I put contraceptives in general into a category of iconic technologies because they allowed for things like family planning.

• 33:25Casey Newton?

  They gave people more control over their own lives and were an incredible bulwark against the spread of infectious disease.

• 33:31Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Casey Newton?

  And to give you just one example of how important condoms are, Kevin didn't wear one one time and now he has a human child.

• 33:40Casey Newton?

  Number 51, eBay.

• 33:42Kevin Roose?

  I put this on the list because eBay really did shape the early internet. It was the first major platform where people could buy and sell things from other people over the internet.

• 33:52Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 33:52Kevin Roose?

  What an amazing thing.

• 33:53Casey Newton?

  And it was one of the companies that first made people comfortable storing their credit cards with an internet company. Like, many people did not want to put their credit card number online before eBay came along and someone decided, you know what? I really do need that shipment of Beanie Babies.

• 34:06Kevin Roose?

  Do you know what the first item sold on eBay was?

• 34:08Casey Newton?

  What was that?

• 34:08Kevin Roose?

  Well, back then it was called Auction Web, but it was a broken laser pointer and it sold for $14.83 in 1995.

• 34:14Casey Newton?

  Well, I hope someone fixed it. And just like that, Kevin, we're through the top half of the list.

• 34:18Kevin Roose?

  We're halfway through.

• 34:19Casey Newton?

  We're halfway through.

• 34:20Kevin Roose?

  I need a sip of coffee, Casey. This is exhausting.

• 34:23Casey Newton?

  I'm in coffee, by the way. Another iconic invention that I guess we'd have to say was an honorable mention on this list.

• 34:28Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 34:28Casey Newton?

  When we come back, Kevin, the remainder of the iconic 100 technologies.

• 34:33Kevin Roose?

  Let's do it.

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• 36:34Kevin Roose?

  All right, Casey, we are back and we are ready to count down the top 50 iconic technologies.

• 36:40Casey Newton?

  If you thought the first 50 were iconic, let me just say, you've heard nothing yet.

• 36:45Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 36:48Kevin Roose?

  All right. Number 50. Corrective lenses. Casey, I think about this all the time.

• 36:53Casey Newton?

  Both you and I are wearing them right now.

• 36:55Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 36:55Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 36:55Kevin Roose?

  What's your prescription?

• 36:57Casey Newton?

  Well, before I had corrective lenses literally implanted into my eyes, I was like negative 12 or something like that. I'm very nearsighted.

• 37:04Kevin Roose?

  You would have died a very short.

• 37:07Casey Newton?

  Probably of dysentery on the Oregon Trail.

• 37:10Kevin Roose?

  Yes, corrective lens is so important. Billions of people have them. They are essential to life if you are a person with bad vision. And they also inspired the song "I Can See Clearly Now the Rain Is Gone."

• 37:22Casey Newton?

  And they also inspired jocks calling nerds "four eyes" in the 80s.

• 37:26Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 37:26Casey Newton?

  It was, used to be considered a vicious insult.

• 37:28Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 37:29Casey Newton?

  Number 49. Slack. Slack promised that it would replace email and make our lives better. And instead, it just gave us something in addition to do to email, and it was worse.

• 37:39Kevin Roose?

  Yes, but I would say iconic because it has totally transformed the culture and the politics of the modern white collar workplace. Many companies now, I think, regret having implemented Slack. But it has also saved me and other workers a lot of time and energy trying to figure out who's doing what inside your organization.

• 37:56Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 37:57Kevin Roose?

  And did you know that Slack is an acronym?

• 37:58Casey Newton?

  For searchable log of all conversation and knowledge?

• 38:02Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 38:03Casey Newton?

  Number 48.

• 38:04Kevin Roose?

  IVF. Speaking of acronyms, in vitro fertilization is an iconic technology because it allowed for babies to be born to people who could not naturally conceive them.

• 38:13Casey Newton?

  Such as Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, who famously had an IVF baby that he talked about on the campaign trail.

• 38:19Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, but that was actually a misnomer because he conceived through IUI, which is another method of fertilization.

• 38:23Casey Newton?

  And it's less iconic than IVF.

• 38:25Kevin Roose?

  Yes. Yes. But IVF, which was once derided as being the test tube babies, is now a major part of fertility treatment for millions of people.

• 38:34Casey Newton?

  It's brought so much happiness to so many people. Number 47. Shipping containers.

• 38:39Kevin Roose?

  So before shipping containers were invented, you had to sort of manually take stuff Off of ships and load them onto trucks and trains. And that caused a lot of friction and took a lot of time and energy. But Malcolm McLean got the idea to create a standardized container that you could transport by truck, train and ship without needing to take any goods out of the container. And that reduced the cost of carrying cargo and led to the world of interconnected shipping that we have today.

• 39:05Casey Newton?

  And I bet things are probably cheaper as a result.

• 39:08Kevin Roose?

  Yes, they are.

• 39:08Casey Newton?

  Number 46.

• 39:09Kevin Roose?

  TikTok.

• 39:10Casey Newton?

  TikTok, the world's most popular short form video app. Kevin, this one really kicked off a revolution, I would say, in social networks when it dropped.

• 39:19Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and I would say it's also become a cultural force and has led to many popular musicians and memes. And just, I would say, has become sort of iconic because of how widely used it is, especially among young people.

• 39:30Casey Newton?

  Very important for its recommendation algorithm, which some people think might be the best in the world. It also created this idea of a network where you don't even have to follow anyone. We'll just use AI to pick out what you think you might like, which everyone has copied since.

• 39:43Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and sort of moved us away from the era of social networks based on who your friends were and what they were sharing into this sort of universal for you feed, where everything is just picked out for you by an algorithm.

• 39:54Casey Newton?

  Also lets the Chinese government spy on you whenever they want. Number 45. The light bulb. Kevin, when I saw this on the list, it was a real light bulb moment for me.

• 40:03Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, light bulbs, obviously iconic. And my favorite fact about the light bulb is that they were one of the first examples of planned obsolescence. This is this theory that people, that companies sort of maliciously make their products not last as long because they want you to keep buying more of them. There was an actual example of planned obsolescence called the Phoebus Cartel, which was a group of major light bulb manufacturers that formed in 1924. And their goal was to shorten the lifespan of light bulbs so that people would buy more of them.

• 40:32Casey Newton?

  My grandfather was murdered by the Phoebus Cartel. He knew too much. Number 44. Microscopes. Good luck seeing the human cell without one of these.

• 40:40Kevin Roose?

  Yes, if you are a biologist or just someone who takes any kind of medicine, you are grateful for the advent of the microscope, which allowed us to see things that could not be observed with the naked eye.

• 40:50Casey Newton?

  It's kind of its own kind of corrective lens, if you really think about it. But what it corrects for is not being able to see the mitochondria,

• 40:57Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Casey Newton?

  which is the powerhouse of the cell.

• 40:59Kevin Roose?

  I loved using microscopes in science class.

• 41:01Casey Newton?

  Number 43. Washing machines!

• 41:03Kevin Roose?

  This is the thing that I think about most when it comes to like, the things that my great grandparents did not have that I have, that have radically made my life easier than them. I run the washing machine every day or every other day.

• 41:15Casey Newton?

  Wow.

• 41:17Kevin Roose?

  I mean, if you have a young child someday, you will too.

• 41:19Casey Newton?

  Because they're always throwing up.

• 41:20Kevin Roose?

  Yes, very dirty, very dirty beings. And the washing machine really freed up people, especially women who were doing the majority of laundry before the advent of the washing machine, to do other things around the house and to actually participate in the workforce. So I think there's an argument that the washing machines have changed not only the way we did our laundry, but also changed the dynamics of the modern household.

• 41:43Casey Newton?

  Beautiful. Number 42. Elevators! Look, before an elevator came along, if you lived on the eighth floor, you were walking up and down every single time and your legs were hurting.

• 41:53Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and they basically created the conditions that made the skyscraper possible and tall buildings that were much larger than anyone would walk, want to walk up or down the stairs to. And my favorite fact about elevators was that Elisha Otis, who was the sort of popularizer of the elevator, was the ultimate salesman. He did this sort of Steve Jobsian demo at the 1854 World's Fair, where he suspended himself on a platform and then had the rope that was holding him up cut and demonstrated the safety brake that he had invented that kept the elevator from plunging to everyone inside's death. And that was a very dramatic reveal.

• 42:29Casey Newton?

  Icon behavior from Elisha Otis. Number 41. Twitter! Oh, RIP Twitter. Founded in 2006, while it was never a particularly well-run company, it also was, I think, the most important news product in the world during its heyday.

• 42:46Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, really created this era of sharing status updates, also catalyzed- The Arab Spring and has had lots of other knock on effects throughout the world. So despite what Twitter has become today, I think it's fair to say it is an iconic technology because it did really usher in this whole era that we're still living in.

• 43:02Casey Newton?

  Also, super important to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Trump was the Twitter candidate.

• 43:08Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 43:08Casey Newton?

  Number 40, refrigerators.

• 43:11Kevin Roose?

  This is another one of those things where I'm like, I would not switch lives with my great grandparents because they had to have ice blocks delivered by the Iceman. But with the refrigerator, finally, there was a reliable way for people to have cold things in their house and keep them cold without the Iceman. It also allowed for the cold transportation of produce around the country, which is why we can have sort of out of season produce today.

• 43:33Casey Newton?

  Yeah, now, at the same time, all the Icemen did lose their jobs.

• 43:36Kevin Roose?

  That's true.

• 43:37Casey Newton?

  So that was kind of sad.

• 43:38Kevin Roose?

  That's true.

• 43:38Casey Newton?

  But I'll say it, I would prefer having a refrigerator than having an Iceman.

• 43:42Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 43:42Casey Newton?

  Number 39, the iMac. This was such an important technology in bringing Apple back from the brink right after Steve Jobs left the first time. Apple was in dire straits. He comes back to the company, they limit the product line to just a few things. And one of the first things that they released under him after he returns is these iMacs that are in these beautiful candy colors.

• 44:04Kevin Roose?

  I loved those. I had the blue one.

• 44:05Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I worked in a newsroom at the Daily Northwestern and we had every single color of the iMac. And it was like the most beautiful looking newsroom that I've ever worked in since because that's how beautiful the iMacs were. They were also just really great computers. They connected to the internet. They had a disk drive so you could, you know, put a CD-ROM in them. iMacs were everything.

• 44:24Kevin Roose?

  They had the circle mouse. Loved the circle mouse.

• 44:26Casey Newton?

  Yes, incredible. Number 38, Napster.

• 44:29Kevin Roose?

  Oh, Napster revolutionized my life as a teenager. It was the first popular peer to peer file sharing system. You could download any song ever. It got sued out of existence by the recording industry. And I think it's fair to say it ushered in the sort of modern streaming music era as we know it because people all of a sudden realized, hey, you can, you don't have to go out and buy whole albums anymore. You can just download individual songs.

• 44:53Casey Newton?

  It completely changed the music industry and certainly from the standpoint of consumers, I think we live in a much better world, you know, before Napster came. Came along. You wanted to listen to a new CD. You were paying $18. Now we pay, you know, what? 10, 11 bucks a month and we can hear every piece of recorded music in the world. Pretty amazing.

• 45:09Kevin Roose?

  Do you know that Best Buy owned Napster for three years?

• 45:12Casey Newton?

  Really? What do they do with it?

• 45:13Kevin Roose?

  Well, they owned it from 2008 to 2011 and then they merged it with Rhapsody, another music streaming service. And it still exists today.

• 45:20Casey Newton?

  Amazing.

• 45:21Kevin Roose?

  It's not free anymore.

• 45:22Casey Newton?

  Number 37.

• 45:23Kevin Roose?

  Money! Before money, you had to barter.

• 45:27Casey Newton?

  You had to say, "Hey, I want a cow. About how many goats will that run me?"

• 45:31Kevin Roose?

  Yes. So, thank you to the leadership of Lydia, modern day Turkey, who around 600 B.C. invented the first metal coins. These coins created the sort of modern currency system that we know today. Where you don't have to barter with beads and wampum and cows and goats anymore. You can just give someone a dollar bill.

• 45:51Casey Newton?

  It's such a relief to be paid in money and not in livestock, the way our ancestors were.

• 45:57Kevin Roose?

  It's true.

• 45:58Casey Newton?

  Number 36.

• 45:59Kevin Roose?

  The cotton gin. Casey, I would put this on the list of iconic technologies because not only did it allow for the quick and easy separation of cotton fibers from their seeds, fueling the Industrial Revolution. It also indirectly caused the Civil War because the cotton gin's invention intensified the demand for slavery in the American South because all of a sudden you could produce way more cotton and people wanted way more cotton. And that expanded slavery in the South and led to the sort of Civil War.

• 46:29Casey Newton?

  So this is sort of a-

• 46:30Kevin Roose?

  It didn't lead to the sort of Civil War. It led to the actual-

• 46:32Casey Newton?

  The actual Civil War. And it just goes to show you, you know, so there's a real, you know, chaos theory thing here where you sort of don't know what's going to happen when you unleash a new technology into the world.

• 46:42Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Casey Newton?

  Or when you unleash it. Number 35. Uber! So, look, the taxi industry had been not great for a long time. I remember before Uber, you would call for a cab in San Francisco and then you would just pray that it would actually show up at your house. And often it would not. And then along comes Uber and you can summon a car to wherever you are in the city with a tap of a button. And it truly did change my life.

• 47:04Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it changed my life too, and I think it changed the course of the technology industry. Obviously, we remember that period in the 2010s where there were like all these Uber for X startups. Many of those failed, but Uber has continued on and I think has reshaped transportation around the world, has also increased congestion, led to a lot of other things that we maybe don't think are so great, but I would say Uber is an iconic technology.

• 47:24Casey Newton?

  Number 34.

• 47:25Kevin Roose?

  The fulcrum! You know, we already talked about the lever, and you can't have levers without fulcrums. It would just be a plank.

• 47:32Casey Newton?

  Tell us about what you would even say a fulcrum is.

• 47:35Kevin Roose?

  Fulcrum is the point that gives levers their leverage. It allows humans to amplify force and perform tasks more efficiently. The fulcrum is essential to technologies like seesaws, scissors, and crowbars.

• 47:47Casey Newton?

  I feel like the physical fulcrum is sort of a metaphorical fulcrum for the leverage that technology has over our lives.

• 47:53Kevin Roose?

  It's true. I would not want to live in a world without fulcrums.

• 47:56Casey Newton?

  Number 33.

• 47:57Kevin Roose?

  Vaccines!

• 47:58Casey Newton?

  I would say, get one before RFK Jr. takes over the Department of Health and Human Services!

• 48:04Kevin Roose?

  Yes, there's a reason that we no longer die of polio, and that is because of vaccines, which I think were a great invention, and we should probably keep them around.

• 48:13Casey Newton?

  The reason I did not get childhood measles, also vaccines. Also, the day in 2021 when I got my COVID vaccine, truly one of the happiest days of my entire life. Vaccines are an amazing, amazing technology.

• 48:26Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 48:27Casey Newton?

  Number 32.

• 48:28Kevin Roose?

  MySpace!

• 48:30Casey Newton?

  So, it was not the first social network. That was arguably Friendster, but man, when MySpace came along, it truly defined a generation on the internet, having to pick your top eight friends and then watching them all jockey for position in your life so that they could be on your profile page, all of the fights that that started. Some of the first influencers and creators became popular on MySpace. Musical artists took off because they were able to promote their music on MySpace, so it had a very brief heyday, but it got a lot done. And also, we were able to all become friends with Tom from MySpace during that time, and he's one of the great internet characters of all time.

• 49:07Kevin Roose?

  Yep.

• 49:08Casey Newton?

  Icon, number 31, AlphaFold.

• 49:11Kevin Roose?

  This was the Google DeepMind product that allowed us to use AI to come up with the 3D structures of proteins, solving a major problem in molecular biology and paving the way for potentially lots of different discoveries in science and medicine. It won the Nobel Prize this year in chemistry, and I would say this is an iconic technology, not because of what it has already done, which is very impressive, but because what I think it will do in the future, which is allow scientists to discover new kinds of vaccines and treatments for different kinds of diseases, potentially saving a lot of lives.

• 49:48Casey Newton?

  Yes, and to me, AlphaFold is the thing that I go to when people say AI is all hype. I say, then you need to reckon with AlphaFold, the things that it has already done, the things that it is about to do, because I think that it's incredible.

• 50:00Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think the only thing that could make it better was if it could AlphaFold my laundry. That would be good.

• 50:04Casey Newton?

  Number 30, Ozempic. Ozempic is relatively new on the scene, Kevin, but I think when all is said and done, people are absolutely going to say this is an iconic technology.

• 50:14Kevin Roose?

  Yes, this class of drugs that Ozempic is a part of, GLP-1 agonists, are displaying radically transformative effects in people with obesity, people with diabetes. It's also got all these other effects that are now being studied about how it helps people kick addictions and things like that. So I just think this is already a very important drug. I think it will be basically ubiquitous in the coming years. And my favorite fun fact, it was inspired by Gila monster venom.

• 50:42Casey Newton?

  Hmm. I got nothing. Number 29, agriculture.

• 50:49Kevin Roose?

  Casey, what do we want to say about agriculture?

• 50:50Casey Newton?

  Agriculture was what took us away from being hunter-gatherers and small tribes and sort of modern life began. And without agriculture, if you wanted a peach or a berry or a pineapple, you just had to hope that you lived near one, Kevin. Agriculture came along, it enabled their mass production, and now you can actually get pretty good strawberries for most of the year in California.

• 51:17Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, agriculture was so- Important to the development of modern society because it meant that you could distribute labor. You could have people who grew the food and people who ate the food and those could be different people. You didn't have to have your own family farm.

• 51:29Casey Newton?

  Number 28, the Walkman. Talk about an icon, you know, when the Walkman came along, all of a sudden you didn't have to be listening to the, the radio to listen to your favorite music. You could put it on a cassette tape, later a CD, walk around town and the world was your oyster. It was really the start of the, the sort of personal technology revolution, I would say.

• 51:50Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. And I think one of the biggest things that sticks out, if you look at photos of like, you know, groups of people 50 years ago, was that none of them are wearing headphones, right? And the Walkman really ushered in this era where you could be constantly walking around, listening to your own personal music. And today we often see people with headphones in AirPods or otherwise. And I would say that's just like a big change in the way that people went about their daily lives. Did you know that Sony initially considered naming the Walkman the Soundabout?

• 52:16Casey Newton?

  Hmm, honestly, pretty good.

• 52:18Kevin Roose?

  Yep.

• 52:18Casey Newton?

  Number 27, cuneiform. Of the foundation of the written word, Kevin.

• 52:23Kevin Roose?

  Yes, it's so important. Among the earliest known examples of cuneiform was a list of receipts for beer, which just so, just shows you how important writing is.

• 52:32Casey Newton?

  Also, one of my most recent uses for writing was getting a receipt for beer and I'm not even kidding. It just goes to show you the enduring power of cuneiform. And let me just say this, if you read the written word today, thank cuneiform.

• 52:44Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 52:44Casey Newton?

  That's where it all started.

• 52:45Kevin Roose?

  We used to be an oral society.

• 52:46Casey Newton?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:47Kevin Roose?

  And now we're a written society.

• 52:49Casey Newton?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:49Kevin Roose?

  Well, I think we're going, we're going away from that because now we've got TikTok, but cuneiform was very important for a long time.

• 52:54Casey Newton?

  Number 26, spaceships. Spaceships, at the end of the day, there's a lot to say about spaceships, but I think it all starts here. They're very cool.

• 53:02Kevin Roose?

  They're very cool and they catalyzed an entire generation of people's interest in science and in exploration. The moon landing was the sort of pivotal turning point of the 20th century in a lot of people's eyes. And I would say that being able to explore space has led us to some very cool and important discoveries.

• 53:21Casey Newton?

  And Kevin, if we ever become a multi-planetary species, spaceships will be the reason that we did it.

• 53:26Kevin Roose?

  Yep.

• 53:26Casey Newton?

  Also, most great sci-fi, I would argue. Ows its life to the existence of spaceships.

• 53:30Kevin Roose?

  True.

• 53:31Casey Newton?

  Number 25.

• 53:32Kevin Roose?

  CRISPR!

• 53:33Casey Newton?

  And we're not talking about the drawer in your refrigerator.

• 53:35Kevin Roose?

  No, the, this is the gene editing technology that was pioneered by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier and other researchers. And while CRISPR has not been in wide use in humans yet, it has already sort of transformed the way that scientists are thinking about the editability of genes and a way that we might be able to cure diseases and engineer new products in the future.

• 54:00Casey Newton?

  Number 24.

• 54:01Kevin Roose?

  Combustion engines! Wow, combustion engines were so important. Imagine having to travel by stagecoach and horse-drawn carriages.

• 54:10Casey Newton?

  As we often did earlier in our careers.

• 54:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and the combustion engine changed all that by making it possible to get around in the new thing called an automobile.

• 54:16Casey Newton?

  And of course, it had a lot of, you know, deleterious effects on the environment. And we got to a place where we realized, hey, we need to transition away from these. But much of modern society was invented by the combustion engine.

• 54:27Kevin Roose?

  True.

• 54:28Casey Newton?

  Number 23.

• 54:29Kevin Roose?

  Aqueducts! I'm obsessed with aqueducts, Casey.

• 54:32Casey Newton?

  Tell me.

• 54:32Kevin Roose?

  I listened to a podcast about them once, a multi-part. It was very cool. Essentially, you know, aqueducts exist because you need fresh water to run a society. And if you do not live in a place with freshwater deposits, you need to get that water from somewhere else. And so aqueducts were popularized in ancient Rome. And, you know, without aqueducts, there's no cities in deserts. No Phoenix, no Los Angeles. Aqueducts are so important to modern society.

• 54:59Casey Newton?

  Moving water around since way back in the day, and they're still doing it, and they're doing a great job.

• 55:04Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 55:05Casey Newton?

  Number 22.

• 55:07Kevin Roose?

  Grinder! I think you put this one on the list.

• 55:08Casey Newton?

  I did. Listen, Grindr, I truly believe, changed the way that people meet in the world. Obviously, it started with gay men hooking up, also dating. But Grindr was really the first location-based dating and hookup network. Grindr is how we get to Tinder, and it's how we get to online dating being the way that so many couples now meet, I would argue. Obviously, it is not the only online dating product, but there was- Something about just as a gay man knowing, hey, there's a really hot guy 600 feet away. Maybe we could hang out right now that changed the world.

• 55:46Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it kind of brought instant gratification and, and, you know, sort of instant fulfillment to dating in a way that has now spread to straight people with apps like Tinder and has led to many, many successful marriages and relationships, and also a lot of unsuccessful ones.

• 56:00Casey Newton?

  That's right, and I hope you'll try Grindr someday. Number 21, the telephone. Oh, telephones, when these came along, they changed the way that we communicate. And I think they actually brought us closer together. And particularly for those of us who live far apart from our friends and loved ones, the telephone became the best way to stay in touch.

• 56:19Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, Alexander Graham Bell really popped off with telephones. They became sort of the, the foundation of modern communication, replacing the telegraph. And I would say they had a long and successful life until they were murdered by text messages. No one calls anymore. It's really a shame.

• 56:35Casey Newton?

  And if you're listening to this, let me just say, call your mother. If she's around, call her. She wants to hear from you. Number 20, semiconductors.

• 56:43Kevin Roose?

  Casey, what would you say a semiconductor is?

• 56:45Casey Newton?

  I would say a semiconductor is how we get computers, Kevin. They power.

• 56:50Kevin Roose?

  You absolutely do not know what a semiconductor is.

• 56:52Casey Newton?

  They're manufactured in Taiwan, and they have a huge geopolitical importance.

• 56:57Kevin Roose?

  You have no idea what you're talking about. A semiconductor, Casey, thank you for asking, is a material such as silicon that has electrical conductivity that is essential for controlling electronic signals in devices like transistors, microchips, and integrated circuits that power almost everything we use today.

• 57:14Casey Newton?

  And that's an icon if I've ever heard one. Number 19, the wheel. You don't have to reinvent it because it was perfect the first time.

• 57:22Kevin Roose?

  And actually, one of my favorite facts about wheels is so they were created to serve as potter's wheels, to make pottery around 3,500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, people think. But it was another 300 years after that until someone had the idea of using them for transportation. 300 years went by before someone said, wait a minute, we could take the potter's wheel, turn it on its side, and put it on a chariot, and then you could go.

• 57:45Casey Newton?

  It just goes to show you, if you think America in 2024 is the dumbest society that's ever existed, you'd have to have to go back to the people that were using the potter's wheel and didn't realize you could put it on a carriage.

• 57:55Kevin Roose?

  That's offensive to Mesopotamians.

• 57:59Casey Newton?

  Number 18, Waymo. Look, this might be a little controversial. It's pretty high on the list, but I'm telling you, when you get into a car and the car drives itself, it blows my mind every single time.

• 58:10Kevin Roose?

  It blows everyone's mind. Who tries this? This is the experience that I've had of showing people Waymo and they come to San Francisco. It's sort of, you can see a childlike wonder in their eyes the first time the car starts driving itself.

• 58:22Casey Newton?

  Yeah, Waymo is a reminder to me that it is possible for technology to do things that are cool and useful and is probably going to save a lot of lives at the end of the day.

• 58:31Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 58:32Casey Newton?

  Number 17, indoor plumbing.

• 58:35Kevin Roose?

  It's so important, Casey.

• 58:37Casey Newton?

  It's so important. You know, before indoor plumbing, let's just say life was incredibly disgusting.

• 58:43Kevin Roose?

  Yes, it was very smelly. People would have to take their sewage and dump it out the window into the street.

• 58:49Casey Newton?

  The disease that bred as a result, the rats that it attracted. And, you know, I think probably everyone involved wishes that they had invented indoor plumbing even sooner than they did.

• 59:00Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 59:00Casey Newton?

  But thank God they did.

• 59:01Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Casey Newton?

  Number 16, Wi-Fi. Wireless fidelity, Kevin.

• 59:06Kevin Roose?

  Is that what it stands for?

• 59:06Casey Newton?

  Absolutely, and we're using it right now to stay connected to the internet, to our production team. And I don't think there's been a day, probably in the past decade, where I haven't either been on Wi-Fi or been complaining that I couldn't get Wi-Fi.

• 59:18Kevin Roose?

  Yes, I would say it has crossed the chasm into things that most people today could not live without. I do remember a time before Wi-Fi. You had to plug in your computer to the wall using Ethernet, but Wi-Fi sort of opened up, you know, an entirely new world.

• 59:33Casey Newton?

  When I got my laptop for college, they told me it had Wi-Fi and they had to explain to me what that was. And I was like, what do you mean? I don't have to plug it into the internet. Truly, my mind was blown at the age of 18. God bless Wi-Fi. Number 15, LSD.

• 59:50Kevin Roose?

  LSD was first synthesized in 1938 by Albert Hofmann, a Swiss chemist, although the psychedelic properties were not discovered until 1943, when he accidentally ingested a miniscule amount of it and ended up on the world's first acid trip. And then, three days later... He took it on purpose. He then rode his bicycle home from his laboratory while tripping on acid. And which is why on April 19th, every year LSD fans celebrate Bicycle Day. LSD was also a major inspiration for Steve Jobs, who then went on to invent the iPhone and lots of other things.

• 1:00:29Casey Newton?

  And I would say, you know, it really kicked off a global interest in psychedelics more broadly, which are still being researched. But I think we believe have some really positive applications, deserve a lot further study, are very powerful. And particularly in Silicon Valley, quite iconic.

• 1:00:43Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and you're on LSD right now.

• 1:00:45Casey Newton?

  I am. And by the way, when did you turn into a giant purple dragon? Number 14.

• 1:00:50Kevin Roose?

  The World Wide Web.

• 1:00:52Casey Newton?

  Oh, boy. You know, this is something that I just have such great nostalgia for, Kevin. The first moments that I was able to connect to the internet, visit websites, leave comments on posts, embed videos. So much of my life, in fact, the life I live today, it is enabled by and made more beautiful by the World Wide Web.

• 1:01:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Did you know that the first ever world wide website is still up?

• 1:01:14Casey Newton?

  And what is it?

• 1:01:15Kevin Roose?

  Here, I'll show you.

• 1:01:16Casey Newton?

  Kevin, that's porn.

• 1:01:17Kevin Roose?

  It's called, it's called World Wide Web. And it says it's a wide area hypermedia information retrieval initiative, aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.

• 1:01:29Casey Newton?

  Sounds like a great idea and long may the web live, even though it's under many challenges right now. Number 13.

• 1:01:35Kevin Roose?

  Batteries. What's your favorite kind of battery?

• 1:01:38Casey Newton?

  My favorite kind of battery is the battery that powers my phone because it keeps getting better and better, which means I have to charge my phone less, which means that I can use it more. How about you?

• 1:01:45Kevin Roose?

  Double As. Very useful.

• 1:01:47Casey Newton?

  What, for your, like, remote control at your house?

• 1:01:49Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, they're in everything.

• 1:01:50Casey Newton?

  Battery, battery technology, it's like, it's like very difficult to get it much better than it is. But every time it gets better, I feel like the world gets better because we just became able to do more things.

• 1:02:00Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, batteries are the way that we were able to do things like light things during the night. That was, that was, it was a way of storing energy.

• 1:02:09Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10Kevin Roose?

  And storing energy is important.

• 1:02:11Casey Newton?

  Do you like a flashlight? Thank a battery.

• 1:02:12Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Casey Newton?

  Number 12.

• 1:02:14Kevin Roose?

  The pill.

• 1:02:15Casey Newton?

  Kevin, birth control. This is truly one of the most. Powerful pieces of technology we've ever seen.

• 1:02:21Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, economists have been talking for years about how the advent of the birth control pill basically paved the way for the modern economy where women can, can sort of plan their families, can participate in the workforce. It was hugely powerful and controversial as a technology.

• 1:02:37Casey Newton?

  Approved in 1960, and it is still doing incredible things for everyone all over the world. Congratulations to the pill number 11.

• 1:02:47Kevin Roose?

  It's a shame it's going to be illegal soon, but.

• 1:02:50Casey Newton?

  Let's just say, stock up. Great time to stock up on the pill. Number 11, email. Look, not everybody loves it, and we all feel like we get too much of it, but you cannot deny an open protocol that lets you message anyone in the world does have a lot of really positive and powerful uses.

• 1:03:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I remember seeing my mom and dad email people back when I was a kid and just being amazed that you could just send messages through your computer.

• 1:03:12Casey Newton?

  I remember my first Hotmail account, which did not automatically update when you got a new email. And so I would just reflexively go to that tab like every six minutes and just reload the browser to see if I had a new email. Because believe it or not, there was a time in your life when it was exciting to get a new email.

• 1:03:26Kevin Roose?

  What was your email address?

• 1:03:27Casey Newton?

  It was my last name and my parents' address at hotmail.com.

• 1:03:33Kevin Roose?

  So thank you to Ray Tomlinson, who invented email in 1971. Casey, do you know how many emails are sent and received every day?

• 1:03:40Casey Newton?

  I'm going to guess more than 100.

• 1:03:42Kevin Roose?

  As of 2024, there are approximately 361.6 billion emails sent and received globally every day, and only half of those are from J. Crew.

• 1:03:53Casey Newton?

  And just like that, Kevin, we are at the top 10.

• 1:03:58Kevin Roose?

  Wow, we're really getting to the important stuff now.

• 1:04:00Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, we have had so many great pieces of technology on this list, but I dare say what is about to come is even more iconic than what has come before.

• 1:04:09Kevin Roose?

  I just love imagining all of the angry emails we're going to get from people who are like, why did you put the fulcrum on this list? Like, people have arguments about this stuff all the time.

• 1:04:18Casey Newton?

  Well, and look, let's just say we have some honorable mentions. For example, the dirigible, we tried to find a place on it on the iconic 100, and we couldn't find one.

• 1:04:25Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Casey Newton?

  Yeah, you might have, you might have your own entry that you think we should have added, and I say, send it in.

• 1:04:31Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:31Casey Newton?

  Email us.

• 1:04:32Kevin Roose?

  And we're not going to do anything with it, but you can send it in.

• 1:04:34Casey Newton?

  Maybe we'll do it next year on the, on the Hard Fork Iconic 200.

• 1:04:37Kevin Roose?

  We should do a least iconic technologies list.

• 1:04:41Casey Newton?

  It's like the Juicero.

• 1:04:43Kevin Roose?

  The Zune.

• 1:04:46Casey Newton?

  I don't know. There's a case of the Zoom was pretty iconic. That's true. It's sort of like the funniest technology, you know? It's true. Anyways, when we come back, the top 10 most iconic technologies.

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• 1:07:10Kevin Roose?

  Wow, Casey, we have done 90 iconic technologies.

• 1:07:15Casey Newton?

  We have, and it's felt really good to sort of highlight both the really obvious things and maybe some of the more obscure technologies that people take for granted, Kevin.

• 1:07:24Kevin Roose?

  Yes, so before we get into the top 10, Casey, we should just say there are some technologies that almost made the cut of the top 100, but did not. So Casey, what are some honorable mention technologies that barely missed the list?

• 1:07:36Casey Newton?

  Sure, so some of those would include forks.

• 1:07:40Kevin Roose?

  The BlackBerry.

• 1:07:41Casey Newton?

  Escalators.

• 1:07:42Kevin Roose?

  Escalators.

• 1:07:43Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 1:07:44Kevin Roose?

  Yes, which also inspired one of my favorite Mitch Hedberg jokes of all time, which was that escalators can't break, they just become stairs.

• 1:07:52Casey Newton?

  Mm-hmm. I would also give a shout out to the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Genesis, and PlayStations 1 through 5.

• 1:08:00Kevin Roose?

  We should also just say that none of these are sponsored. Like, I think that's very important because, you know, we have mentioned some brand names, things like Uber and Waymo, and those companies are not paying us in any way.

• 1:08:13Casey Newton?

  They have no idea we're doing this. We would never tell them that we were doing this because we don't want them to know.

• 1:08:18Kevin Roose?

  Yes. Also, we are not shilling for the fulcrum industry just because these citizens of ancient Mesopotamia wanted us to.

• 1:08:26Casey Newton?

  That's true, but I am open to being sponsored by The Lever if they want to get in touch with us over there. I'm open to it. All right, Kevin, let's jump into the top 10, starting with number 10, the Transformer. And we're not talking about Optimus Prime.

• 1:08:41Kevin Roose?

  Exactly. This is the Transformer neural network architecture that was popularized in 2017 after researchers at Google published the now iconic paper, Attention Is All You Need. In that paper, they described something called a transformer, which became the foundation for everything that we see in AI today. It is the T in ChatGPT stands for Transformer, and everything that has been built in AI of any importance since 2017 has been built on top of the Transformer architecture.

• 1:09:14Casey Newton?

  That's right. And while there are questions about whether transformers really are all you need. There is some thought even to this day that we might be able to create a superintelligence based solely on this technology. And even if we don't get all the way there through Transformers alone, they seem like they will be at least a huge pillar of the foundation of whatever is about to come next.

• 1:09:36Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and I could talk for an hour about Transformers and why they are so important. But I think it's important to say that they were inspired by the alien language in the film Arrival, which had just recently come out, and a group of researchers at Google. One researcher in particular, who was part of that original team, was inspired by watching Arrival and seeing that the aliens in the movie had this language which represented entire sentences with a single symbol. And they thought, hey, what if we did that inside of a neural network? So rather than processing all of the inputs that you would give to one of these systems, one word at a time, you could have this thing called an attention mechanism, which paid attention to all of it simultaneously.

• 1:10:20Kevin Roose?

  That would allow you to process much more information much faster. And that insight sparked the creation of the Transformer, which led to all the stuff we see in AI today.

• 1:10:29Casey Newton?

  I love that story for a lot of reasons, but just the feedback loop between like nerds watching sci-fi and sort of seeing things that don't exist and getting inspired to make things that are real, which then inspires more sci-fi. Super cool, very fun. God help us all, the Transformer, an iconic piece of technology.

• 1:10:47Kevin Roose?

  Yes, it could kill us all, it could save the world. The jury's still out, but I think it's fair to say, already iconic.

• 1:10:53Casey Newton?

  And speaking of things that could kill us all or save the world, number nine.

• 1:10:57Kevin Roose?

  The atomic bomb!

• 1:10:59Casey Newton?

  Kevin, without the atomic bomb, there simply is no Barbenheimer summer in 2023.

• 1:11:04Kevin Roose?

  That's true. I think it's done a few more things than that, but look, the iconic nature of the atomic bomb is because of how important it has been, not only to arguably ending World War II, but through sort of creating the global nuclear reality that we live in today, where nation-states are basically defined on the world stage by whether or not they have access to the atomic bomb. Nuclear powers have been sort of keeping each other in check through mutually assured destruction. And the entire geopolitical order that we now have today basically rests on the atomic bomb.

• 1:11:41Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and we should also say atomic bombs have done horrible things. They've killed hundreds of thousands of people and I hope we never use them again.

• 1:11:48Kevin Roose?

  Yes, me too. One interesting fun fact about atomic bombs is that during the Manhattan Project and the testing of the first atomic bombs, scientists placed beer and soda cans near the first atomic bomb test sites and then drank what was inside afterwards.

• 1:12:04Casey Newton?

  And they all have superpowers now.

• 1:12:05Kevin Roose?

  And that's how we got Surge Cola. No. Some of the cans reportedly tasted a little off, but most were fine and they didn't harm anyone.

• 1:12:15Casey Newton?

  Wow, and that really raises the question, what is in Coca-Cola? Number eight, YouTube. I will never forget the first time I saw a YouTube video embedded on a friend's blog. It was like before then, you sort of had to go to a dedicated website where there was some sort of horrible player, but YouTube said, hey, we're going to take video. And of course you can upload it here, you can watch it here, but we can also just sort of spread it all across the web through embedding. And over time, it became truly one of the most important media innovations of all time, I think.

• 1:12:49Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I would say on a pure hours spent basis, YouTube probably consumes more of the world's attention than basically any other website or technology. It has totally reshaped the entertainment industry, but also just things that I do around the house every day. I mean, yesterday I was watching, I was trying to make some sushi at home for dinner. And so what did I do? I watched a YouTube video and that is how many, many people discover how to do many, many things.

• 1:13:15Casey Newton?

  Every time I have to carve a chicken, I go back to YouTube and watch the same video. But of course, it's not just the how to stuff. There is so much entertainment that happens there. It's about live streaming. It's also about maybe watching really extremist content, or at least it was for a certain period of time before they cracked down on that and led people down some pretty dark rabbit holes. And if you're interested in that, we have a podcast to recommend to you. It's called Rabbit Hole. Kevin hosts it. It's great. But YouTube is truly one of the great icons of all time.

• 1:13:44Kevin Roose?

  And my favorite fact about YouTube and its history was that it was originally supposed to be a dating app. Did you know this?

• 1:13:50Casey Newton?

  I did not know this.

• 1:13:51Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so the co-founders of YouTube basically had this idea for a site where people could upload videos of themselves and then you could find other people's videos and sort of try to date them. And they even had a slogan, "Tune in, hook up." But then no one wanted to upload their videos, so they pivoted to letting anyone upload any videos they wanted.

• 1:14:07Casey Newton?

  They said, "Well, tune in, but we don't really feel like hooking up right now."

• 1:14:12Casey Newton?

  And that's, you know, that just happens sometimes when you're making products.

• 1:14:15Kevin Roose?

  Yep.

• 1:14:16Casey Newton?

  Number seven, airplanes. Oh, the Wright brothers in 1903, Kevin, figured out how to get an airplane off the ground and completed the first flight at Kitty Hawk and kicked off a revolution in the way that we get around this world.

• 1:14:33Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and if you've never read the biography of the Wright brothers by David McCullough, it is one of my favorite biographies of all time. It's a really interesting story of these two brothers who were inventors, also heroes of my native state of Ohio. But they they really did something that people thought was impossible, and they proved that it wasn't. And I think that led to many, many changes that we now take for granted today.

• 1:14:57Casey Newton?

  You know what's interesting? Given how important they are, how few people name their children Orville or Wilbur these days.

• 1:15:03Kevin Roose?

  That's true.

• 1:15:04Casey Newton?

  You'd think this would be due for a comeback. They're icons of flight.

• 1:15:08Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so they were brothers. They were bicycle mechanics. And Wilbur was the older brother, and he was often sort of seen as the more strategic thinker of the two, whereas Orville was known as the sort of ingenious mechanical thinker.

• 1:15:24Casey Newton?

  Hmm. All right. Well, there you have it. Number six, television. As powerful as YouTube, Kevin, is, I really do think that the world that we live in today was created by television.

• 1:15:36Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and obviously television has had a rough past decade or so. The idea of the sort of linear television broadcast is in decline and may never be as popular as it once was because streaming entertainment has popped up to replace it. But TV really reshaped the modern world.

• 1:15:54Casey Newton?

  Mm-hmm. It changed our politics. It changed our culture, the way we entertain ourselves. The way we relax, it went from something that almost no one had in their homes to something that people were watching multiple hours a day. So very hard to come up with many more technologies more iconic than TV.

• 1:16:12Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and it, among its effects, it killed the radio star, according to a song that I heard once.

• 1:16:16Casey Newton?

  It did. It was also, without TV, there is no TV Guide.

• 1:16:20Kevin Roose?

  That's true. Do you know what the first ad shown on TV was for?

• 1:16:23Casey Newton?

  What was it?

• 1:16:24Kevin Roose?

  A Belova watch.

• 1:16:25Casey Newton?

  Hmm, I was gonna guess cigarettes, actually.

• 1:16:28Kevin Roose?

  It's a pretty good guess.

• 1:16:29Casey Newton?

  Number five, penicillin! Oh, thank you, Alexander Fleming.

• 1:16:34Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I love penicillin, mostly because I love accidental inventions, and penicillin was among the world's great accidental inventions.

• 1:16:42Casey Newton?

  Tell us about that.

• 1:16:42Kevin Roose?

  So in 1928, Alexander Fleming was a scientist, and he was about to go on vacation. And before he went on vacation, he piled up a bunch of used Petri dishes in his lab. When he came back, he found mold growing in one of these Petri dishes. And most notably, the mold appeared to have killed some bacteria in the Petri dish while he was on vacation. And he thought to himself, wait a minute, maybe I could harness this mold into something that could be used to kill bacteria.

• 1:17:12Casey Newton?

  Which is such a genius idea, because if I had come back and I had seen that, you know, mold had killed the bacteria, I'd be like, oh my god, we have to kill the mold! We gotta kill our mold here!

• 1:17:20Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Yes.

• 1:17:21Casey Newton?

  You know?

• 1:17:22Kevin Roose?

  And that's why you did not invent penicillin.

• 1:17:24Casey Newton?

  Literally.

• 1:17:24Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:25Casey Newton?

  I mean, also, it had already been invented, but...

• 1:17:27Kevin Roose?

  That's true. But I think this is also an iconic technology, because in addition to its many lifesaving effects, it proved the importance of going on vacation. Without vacation, no penicillin.

• 1:17:37Casey Newton?

  That's beautiful. So thank you, penicillin, and all the antibiotics that it paved the way for, for keeping us healthy. Number four, the printing press. The printing press, you know, before this, if you wanted to read a book, you were gonna have to find a monk to illuminate a manuscript for you.

• 1:17:53Kevin Roose?

  That's true.

• 1:17:53Casey Newton?

  And they did not just want to do that for just about anybody, particularly if you didn't want them to just write the Bible for you.

• 1:17:59Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 1:17:59Casey Newton?

  That was kind of the main book they would write back then, was just the Bible over and over again.

• 1:18:03Kevin Roose?

  That's true. They did a lot of that, and many people devoted their lives to transcribing the Bible by hand, but the Gutenberg Press invented by Johannes Gutenberg really changed the game and ushered in not only the Protestant Reformation, but some also argued the Enlightenment was a result of the printing press, where all of a sudden you didn't have to go town to town, sort of reading your manuscript out loud or having a monk transcribe it for you. You could print a bunch of copies of something and distribute them all over the place.

• 1:18:32Casey Newton?

  It also wreaked havoc. Kevin, recently on the show, we had Yuval Noah Harari, who was telling us that when the printing press came along, essentially misinformation was born and people were spreading terrifying tracts about witches in various towns, doing horrible things. And a lot of people think that the printing press is a major reason why we had so many wars in the immediate aftermath of its invention, because all of a sudden, many more people had speech rights and it led to tons and tons of conflict. So sometimes when people today look at the internet and all of the strife that we see online and the real world effects that have, they compare it to the invention of the printing press and say, we are now living through a shift on the order of the printing press. But the printing press did it first.

• 1:19:12Kevin Roose?

  I have a sad fact about the printing press.

• 1:19:14Casey Newton?

  What's that?

• 1:19:14Kevin Roose?

  Which was that Gutenberg actually never got rich off of his invention because his business partner, Johan Fust, sued him just as he was finishing the Gutenberg Bible, and he won the case and seized his printing press and basically drove him to financial ruin, kicked him out of his own business.

• 1:19:32Casey Newton?

  That is horrible, but the good news is not one person remembers the name of Fust, and I would say many or even most of us know Gutenberg.

• 1:19:39Kevin Roose?

  Yes, he was vindicated.

• 1:19:41Casey Newton?

  Gutenberg, we salute you.

• 1:19:42Kevin Roose?

  Yep.

• 1:19:43Casey Newton?

  King.

• 1:19:44Kevin Roose?

  Thanks, Gutenberg.

• 1:19:45Casey Newton?

  Number three.

• 1:19:46Kevin Roose?

  The iPhone!

• 1:19:47Casey Newton?

  The iPhone is a magical-

• 1:19:49Kevin Roose?

  Wait, wait, you have to say iPhone, because you know, Apple, they have this thing-

• 1:19:54Casey Newton?

  They're very particular.

• 1:19:55Kevin Roose?

  What are those called?

• 1:19:55Casey Newton?

  Definite articles.

• 1:19:56Kevin Roose?

  Definite articles? Yeah, they're not big fans of definite articles. So you'll never hear an Apple executive say, "The iPhone." They only say, "iPhone."

• 1:20:06Casey Newton?

  Okay. Number three, iPhone. The thing about iPhone is that it is a piece of glass and machinery that is a rectangle that fits in your pocket and you can use it to summon all of the world's information, to talk to anyone, to see their face via a video call, to play a game, to entertain yourself. There has rarely been a technology that does so many things and certainly not one that is that small and that affordable for that many people.

• 1:20:34Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and the iPhone, I would say, gets its due. Like, it is almost universally makes the lists of like the, you know, the best inventions of all time because it was just so powerful in taking cellphones from this thing that was sort of ugly and clunky, where you could only sort of make calls and maybe send, you know, text messages, you know, in a very clunky way to this thing that is now ubiquitous and the touchscreen display. The other things that were popular on the iPhone, like the idea of infinite scroll or of the kind of rubber band, what do they call that?

• 1:21:08Casey Newton?

  The effect, the sort of...

• 1:21:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, the snapback effect. So, the iPhone, there are many books that have been written about the development of the iPhone. I think people 100 years from now will still look back on it as an iconic technology. But I think it's really easy to forget how different the world was before the iPhone.

• 1:21:28Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it was worse, at least for me.

• 1:21:30Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and the original code name for the iPhone, Casey, do you know what this is?

• 1:21:33Casey Newton?

  Sasbee.

• 1:21:34Kevin Roose?

  No. It was purple.

• 1:21:37Casey Newton?

  Hmm, well, I think they came up with a better name for that one again.

• 1:21:42Kevin Roose?

  Do you remember when the iPhone came out? Like, do you remember where you were and what your thoughts were?

• 1:21:46Casey Newton?

  I was sitting at my desk in a newspaper in Arizona, and at the time, there was no live stream of the Apple event, so I was having to follow tech blogs and, you know, getting these very incremental updates. But I remember calling a friend afterwards and just saying like, "Do you hear about this thing? Like, this thing seems legitimately amazing." Because obviously, it had been rumored, you know, for months and months, but then when people saw it, they're like, "This seems really cool." And while I would say that the very first iPhone wasn't that great, by the time you get to like iPhone 3G or my favorite iPhone, iPhone 4, that is when it seemed like everything had started to come together and they had really kicked off a revolution.

• 1:22:21Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and that's when basically like every cellphone became an iPhone, right? It was like very hard to find like the flip phone because the iPhone's touchscreen was just so much obviously better than the ones where you had to use a keyboard.

• 1:22:33Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:34Kevin Roose?

  Okay. All right, we've reached the top two.

• 1:22:37Casey Newton?

  Top two.

• 1:22:38Kevin Roose?

  We are in the pantheon of the greatest technologies of all time. Casey, number two.

• 1:22:45Casey Newton?

  Electricity. Electricity, it's powering all of the lights in this studio. It is providing power to our laptops and it is the feeling that Kevin and I have between each other every time we step into the podcast studio. And that's electricity.

• 1:22:59Kevin Roose?

  Yes, modern life as we know it today would not be possible without electricity.

• 1:23:04Casey Newton?

  And who invented it?

• 1:23:05Kevin Roose?

  Well, it's, um.

• 1:23:10Kevin Roose?

  Was it Ben Franklin? Technically, it wasn't invented. It's a natural phenomenon that has always existed, but it was harnessed by many people over a period of centuries. Obviously Benjamin Franklin and his famous kite experiment in 1752 demonstrated that lightning was a form of electricity. But it also, we needed things like the electrical battery, which was invented in 1800 by Alessandro Volta, Michael Faraday, who had discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831. And then we got things like alternating current from Nikola Tesla and the light bulb from Thomas Edison.

• 1:23:53Kevin Roose?

  All of these are implementations of electricity.

• 1:23:57Casey Newton?

  I mean, it's, uh, not only is it a technology, but it's like a force of nature, right? And we have been able to harness it in so many ways. And every time I turn my lights on, I say, thank you, electricity.

• 1:24:10Kevin Roose?

  Yes, one of my favorite books of all time is by a historian named David Nye, who wrote this book called Electrifying America. And it's just sort of about the period where electricity was really seeping into American life and culture and how it redefined basically everything. Like you would be in a, some sort of an agricultural village or something where people were, were doing subsistence farming and all of a sudden electricity would come to town and it totally changed everything about your life. You could, you could do things at night. You could extend the workday. Like it became possible to have just all kinds of new technologies in your life that would basically take you out of the subsistence farming era and into modernity.

• 1:24:54Casey Newton?

  And that's what we want to see more of, out of our technology. Change our lives in positive ways, please.

• 1:25:01Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, can't believe it, but we've arrived at number one.

• 1:25:04Kevin Roose?

  God.

• 1:25:05Casey Newton?

  And this took a lot of thought, a lot of, a lot of debate, a lot of, a lot of fractious, contentious debate. But when we really thought long and hard about it, there was only one possible candidate for the most iconic technology of all time. And we'll say it now, the number one most iconic technology of all time.

• 1:25:23Kevin Roose?

  Fire!

• 1:25:24Casey Newton?

  First of all, only technology on this list that was stolen from the gods. Thank you, Prometheus. Second of all, once we became able to control fire sometime within the past million years, we were able to cook food, which was one of the biggest revolutions of all time. We were also able to create campfires and sit around and tell stories, which became the foundation that podcasting is built upon.

• 1:25:54Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 1:25:54Casey Newton?

  And a third thing I would say, once we began to be able to control fire, we were able to adopt a scorched earth technique to our military campaigns. So if it really seemed like we were going to lose a war, we could just burn down our whole country. I think they did that in Russia once or twice.

• 1:26:10Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I would say the, the most important application of fire has been to keeping us warm.

• 1:26:16Casey Newton?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:17Kevin Roose?

  Right?

• 1:26:17Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:18Kevin Roose?

  People would just die of being cold.

• 1:26:20Casey Newton?

  Fire is the most iconic source of heat that exists.

• 1:26:23Kevin Roose?

  It's true. And it's sort of a cliche now among people in our world, the tech industry, to compare AI to fire in some way, to say it's, you know, the most important invention since Firestein Dorepichai, the CEO of Google, has said that. But I think implicit in that is that no one is arguing that fire is the most important technology of all time. We just sort of take that one for granted.

• 1:26:46Casey Newton?

  We do. And so today, we really wanted to celebrate it because I think fire is, it perfectly encapsulates so much of what we talk about when we talk about tech, which is it is incredibly powerful. It has many wonderful uses. And also, if it is not controlled, it can absolutely kill you.

• 1:27:05Kevin Roose?

  Yes, it is a dual-use technology that can cause both extreme harm as in a wildfire or... A house fire, or it can cook food and keep you warm and help you survive. Fire also allowed humans to migrate, to leave warm regions and settle in colder areas. It helped humans navigate the dark with things like lamps and lanterns. And it was essential for making things like metal.

• 1:27:33Casey Newton?

  Well, anything else we should say about fire?

• 1:27:34Kevin Roose?

  What would you say is your favorite kind of fire?

• 1:27:37Casey Newton?

  Hmm, my favorite kind of fire is is when the roof is on fire, but you don't need any water. And so you just let the mother F'er burn like sort of in a dance club setting. You know what I mean? Do you remember? Do you remember the old song that said, you know, somebody called 911 because there's a shorty fire burning on the dance floor? To me, that that's the kind of fire I want to be a part of. How about you?

• 1:27:58Kevin Roose?

  I'm a big fan of the bonfire.

• 1:28:00Casey Newton?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 1:28:01Kevin Roose?

  Still a great place to have a conversation, to maybe roast some marshmallows, to sing some folk music. Bonfires, they also, you know, I love this. I love the way they smell.

• 1:28:13Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, it feels like you shouldn't want your clothes to smell like a bonfire afterwards. But it always makes me happy when it does.

• 1:28:18Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Casey Newton?

  Love a bonfire. Well, Kevin, any final reflections on this list of 100 iconic technologies?

• 1:28:26Kevin Roose?

  Yes, I would say this was an exercise that seemed a little bit stunt-y to me when you first proposed doing it. And I should say it is stunt-y. We are doing this in part because we're taking a week off making a podcast about the news. But I would also say that it has, doing all of the research about all of these iconic technologies has really made me appreciate just the process of invention and the people who go out into the world. And they say, there's a problem, I want to fix it.

• 1:28:56Casey Newton?

  Exactly, you know, look, I love the aspect of my job that lets me to think critically about technologies and point out potential problem areas and urge people to fix them. But I wouldn't have started writing about these issues at all if I didn't fundamentally love trying new things and sampling the fruits of human ingenuity. And so having a chance today to run through all of them with you, celebrate them a little bit, and frankly, try to point the way forward for other inventors out there who want to have a positive impact on the world. I had a lot of fun.

• 1:29:27Kevin Roose?

  Yes, me too. Casey, that is the 100 most iconic technologies of all time.

• 1:29:33Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and if we, look, we may have missed something, you should feel free to email. If we missed something really obvious, I actually do want to hear about it because we may take another run at this sometime, you know, things are going to move up and down on this list. By next year, there are going to be more technologies in the world that could be worthy of our consideration. So if you have an iconic technology out there that we didn't consider, and you don't work for the company that makes it or their PR agency, we are [email protected].

• 1:29:57Kevin Roose?

  Thanks for listening.

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

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• 1:32:00Kevin Roose?

  Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show is engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Marian Lozano, Rowan Nemezto, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galogly. Video production by Ryan Manning and Chris Chopp. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Puywing Tam, Dahlia Hadad, and Jeffrey Miranda. As always, you can email us at [email protected].

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